​In Vitro

​​

Morning and I listen for

clues in the familiar maze.
World becoming itself again
among these sycamores,
their music of rasping leaves.

​

Long ago in the family house
our mirrors the parents showing us
ourselves before school and
after in the desperate shadows
of evening.

​

Life the clown showing only
its plastic face and long red slippers.
Whirling legs and arms mocking
the margins.

​

I can’t explain the emptiness that
holds me like a tight blanket
in an operating room.

​

I can’t make a connection.

​

How the hours slice through me
on their weightless dagger.

​

How I retrace the steps no
longer there.

​

How Anne spoke her poems
at the bistro only a week ago
and vanished the
next day,

​

not even a note, not even

a blue scarf.

​



​0ver and Back



Those summers we explored the

deeper woods below the bluffs

like twin phantoms.

​

You saying: what is it with time,
how it occupies space
without saying

a word.

​

How it spills through us

like the rays of moon.

​

But didn’t we agree traveling
is dangerous.
Didn’t we believe edges

attract and repel.

​

And the memories we’d lived
through, how they grew skin and aged

like an old man’s jowls.

​

The shadows that seemed almost

benign as though asleep.

​

And sleep you saying.

​

Isn’t that where space and time

invent themselves as never before.

​

Didn’t we dream away whole summers
under the willows where the stream
carried away the hours in its

lavender arms.

​

Didn’t we imagine ourselves

growing old but

always young.

​











 



​